Everyone knows Frank Sinatra, but no one knows about his agitation for leftist causes in the 1930s and ‘40s. Fiorello La Guardia got an airport, but Sacco and Vanzetti got a march and a folk song. Italian-Americans are known for their cultural contributions to American society and, of course, New Haven in particular — look no further than Wooster Street, the cradle of pizza civilization — but what about their political legacy as a group that often struck and organized for worker’s rights and better treatment by White society? The path to assimilation was not smooth, and the very organizing that got them there seems to have been lost to public consciousness.
That was one of many takeaways from the latest Author Talk at the New Haven Free Public Library, a series of virtual conversations centered on “the American Experience.” Last week’s installment featured Professor Gerald Meyer, “back” (via Zoom) to speak on his latest book project, The Unity of the People: Studies in Italian American Radicalism — a forthcoming collection of essays that cover everything from the eponymous communist newspaper L’Unità del Popolo to Sinatra’s leftist sympathies.
The lens of time often flattens three dimensional subjects into a series of quotes or indelible pictures. The Italian-American story, as it is understood in popular culture, is one of immigration, discrimination, and, eventually, assimilation into the broader White American society, as Italian-Americans found bridges of acceptance in the form of popular figureheads like Christopher Columbus and Frank Sinatra, whose Rat Pack brought a specific kind of Italian-American flair to the stage. There’s pizza, The Godfather, the Jersey Shore, LaGuardia Airport, Olive Garden. Italian culture has been partially melted into American culture. You can find pizza everywhere now. In many ways, the Italian-American story is one of near-perfect assimilation into American society.
Yet there’s another side to this history of Italians in America, as opposed to Italian-Americans: one of mutual aid organizations, worker organizing, campaigning for racial equality, and lively newspapers that helped create a tightly woven social net of Italian immigrants involved in activism and communism. Meyer, professor emeritus of CUNY’s Hostos Community College, has long staked a claim on the study of Italian-American radicalism, and particularly the life and work of Vito Marcantonio, who served seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives as a rep for East Harlem. He was a member of the American Labor Party, a leftist political party that existed in the first half of the 20th century.
Seth Godfrey, manager of the library’s adult services department, had welcomed Meyer back after 18 years, and after hearing the professor speak specifically on Marcantonio. The talk was part of the Summer Series at 7 — themed around “The American Experience” — touched on the specifically Italian version of what it is to come to a new country as a completely marginalized and disempowered population, and the social networks that crop up to confront this fact. Tom Costa, the curator and coordinator of the series, dryly introduced the talk as “the 7 p.m. warmup for the Republican National Convention,” and went on to explain the format of the talk, along with a short biographical introduction of Prof. Meyer. He advised the public to take another sip of homemade sangria, and with that, the talk began.
Meyer, spectacled and in front of a deeply academic bookshelf, spoke conversationally, almost interlocuting with himself as he moved from the origins of his own scholarship — a desire to produce useful work for the left and a happenstance box of correspondence from 1950 — to his thoughts on Frank Sinatra’s musical politics and how the decline of Italian radicalism in the popular consciousness came about.
Italy, he said, was practically “designed for Marxists,” in the early 20th century. The old-guard feudalism gave way to capitalism. Migrations of unskilled workers to the north of Italy gave way to the displacement of many and a poor standard of living — albeit a very communal mindset. This mindset stuck, particularly when Italian immigrants landed in America. They found themselves discriminated against by greater American society, including the Catholic Church.
“There was no one tending to their needs,” Meyer said. “The Catholic Church did wonders for the Irish, but didn’t help the Italians.” As such, Italian children went to public school, and maintained a cohesive cultural identity separate from that of white, assimilated America.
Part of this entailed involvement with the Communist Party, Labor Party, and other radical factions. This ran counter to the pressure to assimilate on the part of American society, as leftist political organizations valued cultural diversity.
“They left people’s cultures alone. They didn’t try to Americanize or Bolshevize. They were leaving people with their own culture, with what was comfortable, and hopefully with their own leadership … that would be the way you could reach the most people as possible,” Meyer said.
Meyer noted that, even then, part of the work of organizing was pushing away from assimilation and instead empowering communities with their own cultures and leadership. Italians spoke their dialects first and Italian second. Perhaps their children spoke English. Banking systems, insurance, and mutual aid ran rampant in the Italian community with the help of the broader Communist Party, and newspapers such as l’Unità del Popolo helped cement this cultural affirmation. To the left, assimilation was not a prerequisite of having a right to a good life in America, and thus workers agitated for this.
How did the Italian-American community’s rich tradition of agitation for the rights of workers get lost to the sands of time? Meyer noted that after the 1950s, most leftist agitation was stamped out by McCarthyism and the deep conservatism that joined it. Political history focused on Italian anarchism with such figures as Sacco and Vanzetti — themselves the subject of many articles, a march in Boston, and a Woody Guthrie song. These forces combined to loosen from the collective Italian-American memory the neighborhood solidarity networks seen in large Italian neighborhoods like East Harlem, or, more locally, Wooster Square, which saw worker agitation and strikes throughout the early 20th century.
This talk sets the perfect stage for a communal grappling with the past, present, and future of the Italian-American community and its own sense of history and identity, especially in the wake of the removal of the statue of Columbus in Wooster Square. We know the Knights of Columbus, and the Italian church communities, and the wonderful heritage of Wooster Square, with its pizza and its festivals. But what of the garment workers who agitated to get better wages, enabling many Italian families to migrate to East Haven and other suburbs, where they still live? What of the common cause Italian immigrants had with Puerto Rican and Black Communities in Harlem, thus electing Vito Marcantonio to Congress seven times, who advocated against the poll tax and other racist provisions?
And how is it, that after so many years, some Italian-Americans can still reduce their vibrant cultural identity to a man who wasn’t Italian (Italy didn’t exist at the time of Columbus), worked for Spain, and never set foot in the continental United States? For them, where did the deep roots of solidarity with other marginalized communities — a hallmark of Italian life before and after migration — go?
In showing us the deeper and more complex history of the Italian-American experience, Meyer’s talk moves toward a true reckoning of the two threads in the tapestry of Italian-American history; I can only hope that there will be a larger forum like this in the future that allows people to come together and better understand their history — all of it.
The next Author Talk, on Sept. 9, features Dr. Gerald Horne talking about “Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary.” Visit the NHFPL’s website for more details.
Italy didn't exist at the time of Columbus
Italy did not exist as a state, but it certainly existed as a geographic area, and arguably, as a nation. The 19th and 20th centuries saw the rise of nationalism in Europe and consequently, more nation-states, where national and state boundaries aligned.